How gameshow apps with real cash prizes could be huge in 2018

A new craze is coming to your mobile in 2018. A craze that is both fun and gives you the chance to win some big cash prizes. This craze is real time quiz apps that allow you to compete against other users and also offer the winners lucrative prizes.

The biggest of these real time quiz apps is HQ Trivia for the iPhone but there are others on the horizon and with a recently launched beta version of HQ Trivia on Android, soon millions of us will be logging in to compete for a share of the top prize. Let’s have a look at these apps in a little more detail.

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HQ Trivia (iOS)

HQ - Live Trivia is an app that allows you to pit your wits against a range of trivia questions tackling various different subjects. Join in with literally thousands of other players and compete to find out who will be the trivia champion of the day. There are prizes to be won, but only if you keep your wits about you and manage to answer the questions correctly!

If you’ve ever watched a TV gameshow you’ll have a fairly good idea about these real time quiz apps work. HQ Trivia replaces the studio audience with thousands of players on their respective smartphones and everybody has a chance to win. Everyday at 3pm and 9pm Eastern Time in the USa host takes the players through 12 multiple-choice questions. Anybody who gets all 12 questions right will get a share of the prize pot for that quiz. A wrong answer, however, will see you eliminated from the game. The prizes can be big. HQ’s shared jackpot on it’s NYE quiz was $18,000.

HQ isn’t the only offering but it is both the first and the biggest. Other live quiz apps include The Q on Android and Showtime, which is geared towards Indian audiences. Going forward into 2018 all of these apps will need to address a number of issues as they’re not your average trivia or quiz apps. Technical issues are front and center. As the number of users increases so does pressure on the servers being used by the apps. On HQ’s big NYE quiz a whopping 459,000 people logged in to play and most of them didn’t even get to see any questions and were left with the host merely entertaining them for thirteen minutes. This highlights another potential problem for apps, the hosts themselves. Gameshow hosts play a huge part in making them entertaining and engaging for their audiences. Hosts need to be entertaining, quick-witted, and most of-all not annoying.

With potential problems to address there is no guarantee that live quiz apps will end up being any more than just another fad app that’ll soon fade away. This is unlikely, however, as it’d be wise to look at the success of TV gameshows to gage potential rather than apps that have landed with a big splash and then faded away. Interactive gameshows with real prizes certainly have an appeal and if you consider the broad demographics, from retirees to stay at home parents, that tune in daily to quiz shows there are a lot of people who’ll be intrigued by this new format. If there is demand the technical issues will be overcome and there is no reason to think that this is the only quiz format we’ll see either.

Moving forward then, HQ is sitting at the forefront, the app recently logged over 1,000,000 users for a single quiz, of what could end up being a brand new genre of interactive media. Now, the app doesn’t make any money and doesn’t even feature any ads. All of the prize money comes from venture capital, with investors hoping the game will become big enough for brands to pay to be associated with it.

There is certainly a lot of promise but investors should be wary of the fact that the people behind HQ Trivia also founded Vine, which recently shut down due to the fact it wasn’t making any money. For the rest of us, however, the fact that short looped videos are still all over the internet should be another indicator that maybe live quiz apps are here to stay and we’ll be seeing lots more of them going into 2018. We’ll just have to wait and see and, in the meantime, maybe try and win some money.

Let us know if you’ve played a live quiz app or if you plan on doing so in the future in the comments section below.